OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Uniform Interpolation Constrained Geodesic Learning on Data Manifold
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we propose a method to learn a minimizing geodesic within a data manifold. Along the learned geodesic, our method can generate high-quality interpolations between two given data samples. Specifically, we use an autoencoder network to map data samples into latent space and perform interpolation via an interpolation network. We add prior geometric information to regularize our autoencoder for the convexity of representations so that for any given interpolation approach, the generated interpolations remain within the distribution of the data manifold. Before the learning of a geodesic, a proper Riemannianmetric should be defined. Therefore, we induce a Riemannian metric by the canonical metric in the Euclidean space which the data manifold is isometrically immersed in. Based on this defined Riemannian metric, we introduce a constant speed loss and a minimizing geodesic loss to regularize the interpolation network to generate uniform interpolation along the learned geodesic on the manifold. We provide a theoretical analysis of our model and use image translation as an example to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
End-to-End Face Parsing via Interlinked Convolutional Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Face parsing is an important computer vision task that requires accurate pixel segmentation of facial parts (such as eyes, nose, mouth, etc.), providing a basis for further face analysis, modification, and other applications. Interlinked Convolutional Neural Networks (iCNN) was proved to be an effective two-stage model for face parsing. However, the original iCNN was trained separately in two stages, limiting its performance. To solve this problem, we introduce a simple, end-to-end face parsing framework: STN-aided iCNN(STN-iCNN), which extends the iCNN by adding a Spatial Transformer Network (STN) between the two isolated stages. The STN-iCNN uses the STN to provide a trainable connection to the original two-stage iCNN pipeline, making end-to-end joint training possible. Moreover, as a by-product, STN also provides more precise cropped parts than the original cropper. Due to these two advantages, our approach significantly improves the accuracy of the original model. Our model achieved competitive performance on the Helen Dataset, the standard face parsing dataset. It also achieved superior performance on CelebAMask-HQ dataset, proving its good generalization. Our code has been released at https://github.com/aod321/STN-iCNN.
Service Selection using Predictive Models and Monte-Carlo Tree Search
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

This article proposes a method for automated service selection to improve treatment efficacy and reduce re-hospitalization costs. A predictive model is developed using the National Home and Hospice Care Survey (NHHCS) dataset to quantify the effect of care services on the risk of re-hospitalization. By taking the patient's characteristics and other selected services into account, the model is able to indicate the overall effectiveness of a combination of services for a specific NHHCS patient. The developed model is incorporated in Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to determine optimal combinations of services that minimize the risk of emergency re-hospitalization. MCTS serves as a risk minimization algorithm in this case, using the predictive model for guidance during the search. Using this method on the NHHCS dataset, a significant reduction in risk of re-hospitalization is observed compared to the original selections made by clinicians. An 11.89 percentage points risk reduction is achieved on average. Higher reductions of roughly 40 percentage points on average are observed for NHHCS patients in the highest risk categories. These results seem to indicate that there is enormous potential for improving service selection in the near future.
Convex Density Constraints for Computing Plausible Counterfactual Explanations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The increasing deployment of machine learning as well as legal regulations such as EU's GDPR cause a need for user-friendly explanations of decisions proposed by machine learning models. Counterfactual explanations are considered as one of the most popular techniques to explain a specific decision of a model. While the computation of "arbitrary" counterfactual explanations is well studied, it is still an open research problem how to efficiently compute plausible and feasible counterfactual explanations. We build upon recent work and propose and study a formal definition of plausible counterfactual explanations. In particular, we investigate how to use density estimators for enforcing plausibility and feasibility of counterfactual explanations. For the purpose of efficient computations, we propose convex density constraints that ensure that the resulting counterfactual is located in a region of the data space of high density.
Force-Sensor-Less Bilateral Teleoperation Control of Dissimilar Master-Slave System with Arbitrary Scaling
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

This study designs a high-precision bilateral teleoperation control for a dissimilar master-slave system. The proposed nonlinear control design takes advantage of a novel subsystem-dynamics-based control method that allows designing of individual (decentralized) model-based controllers for the manipulators locally at the subsystem level. Very importantly, a dynamic model of the human operator is incorporated into the control of the master manipulator. The individual controllers for the dissimilar master and slave manipulators are connected in a specific communication channel for the bilateral teleoperation to function. Stability of the overall control design is rigorously guaranteed with arbitrary time delays. Novel features of this study include the completely force-sensor-less design for the teleoperation system with a solution for a uniquely introduced computational algebraic loop, a method of estimating the exogenous operating force of an operator, and the use of a commercial haptic manipulator. Most importantly, we conduct experiments on a dissimilar system in 2 degrees of freedom (DOF). As an illustration of the performance of the proposed system, a force scaling factor of up to 800 and position scaling factor of up to 4 was used in the experiments. The experimental results show an exceptional tracking performance, verifying the real-world performance of the proposed concept.
Towards Reliable UAV Swarm Communication in D2D-Enhanced Cellular Network
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

In the existing cellular networks, it remains a challenging problem to communicate with and control an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm with both high reliability and low latency. Due to the UAV swarm's high working altitude and strong ground-to-air channels, it is generally exposed to multiple ground base stations (GBSs), while the GBSs that are serving ground users (occupied GBSs) can generate strong interference to the UAV swarm. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel two-phase transmission protocol by exploiting cellular plus device-to-device (D2D) communication for the UAV swarm. In Phase I, one swarm head is chosen for ground-to-air channel estimation, and all the GBSs that are not serving ground users (available GBSs) transmit a common control message to the UAV swarm simultaneously, using the same cellular frequency band, to combat the strong interference from occupied GBSs. In Phase II, all the UAVs that have decoded the common control message in Phase I further relay it to the other UAVs in the swarm via D2D communication, by exploiting the less interfered D2D frequency band and the proximity among UAVs. In this paper, we aim to characterize the reliability performance of the above two-phase protocol, i.e., the expected percentage of UAVs in the swarm that can decode the common control message, which is a non-trivial problem due to the complex system setup and the intricate coupling between the two phases. Nevertheless, we manage to obtain an approximated expression of the reliability performance of interest, under reasonable assumptions and with the aid of the Pearson distributions. Numerical results validate the accuracy of our analytical results and show the effectiveness of our protocol over other benchmark protocols. We also study the effect of key system parameters on the reliability performance, to reveal useful insights on the practical system design.
Performance Analysis of Reversible Binding Receptor Based Decode-and-Forward Relay in Molecular Communication Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Molecular communication (MC) allows nanomachines to communicate and cooperate with each other in a fluid environment. The diffusion-based MC is popular but is easily constrained by the transmit distance due to the severe attenuation of molecule concentrations. In this letter, we present a decode-and-forward (DF) relay strategy for the reversible binding receptor in the diffusion-based MC system. The time-varying spatial distribution of the information molecules based on the reversible association and dissociation between ligand and receptor at the surface of receiver is characterized. An analytical expression for the evaluation of expected error probability is derived, and the key factors impacting on the performance are exploited. Results show that with a constant molecular budget, the proposal can improve the performance significantly, and the performance gain can be enhanced by optimizing the position of the relay node and the number of molecules assigned to the source node.
dtControl: Decision Tree Learning Algorithms for Controller Representation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Decision tree learning is a popular classification technique most commonly used in machine learning applications. Recent work has shown that decision trees can be used to represent provably-correct controllers concisely. Compared to representations using lookup tables or binary decision diagrams, decision trees are smaller and more explainable. We present dtControl, an easily extensible tool for representing memoryless controllers as decision trees. We give a comprehensive evaluation of various decision tree learning algorithms applied to 10 case studies arising out of correct-by-construction controller synthesis. These algorithms include two new techniques, one for using arbitrary linear binary classifiers in the decision tree learning, and one novel approach for determinizing controllers during the decision tree construction. In particular the latter turns out to be extremely efficient, yielding decision trees with a single-digit number of decision nodes on 5 of the case studies.
Real-Time Semantic Background Subtraction
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Semantic background subtraction SBS has been shown to improve the performance of most background subtraction algorithms by combining them with semantic information, derived from a semantic segmentation network. However, SBS requires high-quality semantic segmentation masks for all frames, which are slow to compute. In addition, most state-of-the-art background subtraction algorithms are not real-time, which makes them unsuitable for real-world applications. In this paper, we present a novel background subtraction algorithm called Real-Time Semantic Background Subtraction (denoted RT-SBS) which extends SBS for real-time constrained applications while keeping similar performances. RT-SBS effectively combines a real-time background subtraction algorithm with high-quality semantic information which can be provided at a slower pace, independently for each pixel. We show that RT-SBS coupled with ViBe sets a new state of the art for real-time background subtraction algorithms and even competes with the non real-time state-of-the-art ones. Note that we provide python CPU and GPU implementations of RT-SBS at https://github.com/cioppaanthony/rt-sbs.
PCNN: Pattern-based Fine-Grained Regular Pruning towards Optimizing CNN Accelerators
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Weight pruning is a powerful technique to realize model compression. We propose PCNN, a fine-grained regular 1D pruning method. A novel index format called Sparsity Pattern Mask (SPM) is presented to encode the sparsity in PCNN. Leveraging SPM with limited pruning patterns and non-zero sequences with equal length, PCNN can be efficiently employed in hardware. Evaluated on VGG-16 and ResNet-18, our PCNN achieves the compression rate up to 8.4X with only 0.2% accuracy loss. We also implement a pattern-aware architecture in 55nm process, achieving up to 9.0X speedup and 28.39 TOPS/W efficiency with only 3.1% on-chip memory overhead of indices.
Hypergraphs: an introduction and review
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2020
Year: 2020

Hypergraphs were introduced in 1973 by Bergé. This review aims at giving some hints on the main results that we can find in the literature, both on the mathematical side and on their practical usage. Particularly, different definitions of hypergraphs are compared, some unpublished work on the visualisation of large hypergraphs done by the author. This review does not pretend to be exhaustive.
Direct Solution of FEM Models: Are Sparse Direct Solvers the Best Strategy?
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2020
Year: 2020

A brief summary of direct solution approaches for finite element methods (FEM) in computational electromagnetics (CEM) is given along with an alternative direct solution based on domain decomposition (DD). Unlike recent trends in approximate/low-rank solvers, this work focuses on `numerically exact' solution methods as they are more reliable for complex `real-life' models. Preliminary studies on general three dimensional geometries with unstructured FEM meshes suggest that the proposed direct DD methodology offers significant memory advantages over highly optimized, high-performance sparse direct solver libraries, while maintaining approximately comparable or slightly slower serial serial execution speed but with significantly better parallel and GPU processing prospects.
An Extensible Network Slicing Framework for Satellite Integration into 5G
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

For the past decades, networks have evolved to increase their performances, their capacities, to reduce latencies and optimize their resource management in order to remain competitive and adapted to the market. Today, the way consumers use networks has changed and more heterogeneous services with their own requirements have emerged. This has led network operators to define the network slicing paradigm. Network slicing creates multiple partitions in the network, each partition can be dedicated to a particular service allowing vertical markets and multiple services with different requirements to run on top of a single infrastructure. To allow the flexibility level required by network slicing, satellite technologies have to evolve. Satcoms actors have therefore been working on improving satellite equipments. Testbeds followed the theoretical analysis and ESA's current project SATis5 is making it its core topic. The work presented in the full-paper of this extend abstract is the next step we propose to those initiatives. It focuses on the network slicing concept applied to satellite networks which, we believe, is a mandatory requirement for a full integrated satellite into 5G networks. We first start by describing the main challenges associated to the satellite slice definition. We then highlight a set of requirements for such a satellite slice. Based on those requirements, we construct and propose a complete Satellite Slice as a Service (S3) framework which mutualizes the satellite infrastructure to provide a seamless integration into 5G networks.
Wireless Federated Learning with Local Differential Privacy
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we study the problem of federated learning (FL) over a wireless channel, modeled by a Gaussian multiple access channel (MAC), subject to local differential privacy (LDP) constraints. We show that the superposition nature of the wireless channel provides a dual benefit of bandwidth efficient gradient aggregation, in conjunction with strong LDP guarantees for the users. We propose a private wireless gradient aggregation scheme, which shows that when aggregating gradients from $K$ users, the privacy leakage per user scales as $\mathcal{O}\big(\frac{1}{\sqrt{K}} \big)$ compared to orthogonal transmission in which the privacy leakage scales as a constant. We also present analysis for the convergence rate of the proposed private FL aggregation algorithm and study the tradeoffs between wireless resources, convergence, and privacy.
Fast and Scalable Complex Network Descriptor Using PageRank and Persistent Homology
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2020
Year: 2020

The PageRank of a graph is a scalar function defined on the node set of the graph which encodes nodes centrality information of the graph. In this article, we use the PageRank function along with persistent homology to obtain a scalable graph descriptor and utilize it to compare the similarities between graphs. For a given graph $G(V,E)$, our descriptor can be computed in $O(|E|α(|V|))$, where $α$ is the inverse Ackermann function which makes it scalable and computable on massive graphs. We show the effectiveness of our method by utilizing it on multiple shape mesh datasets.
A Combined Stochastic and Physical Framework for Modeling Indoor 5G Millimeter Wave Propagation
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

Indoor coverage is a major challenge for 5G millimeter waves (mmWaves). In this paper, we address this problem through a novel theoretical framework that combines stochastic indoor environment modeling with advanced physical propagation simulation. This approach is particularly adapted to investigate indoor-to-indoor 5G mmWave propagation. Its system implementation, so-called iGeoStat, generates parameterized typical environments that account for the indoor spatial variations, then simulates radio propagation based on the physical interaction between electromagnetic waves and material properties. This framework is not dedicated to a particular environment, material, frequency or use case and aims to statistically understand the influence of indoor environment parameters on mmWave propagation properties, especially coverage and path loss. Its implementation raises numerous computational challenges that we solve by formulating an adapted link budget and designing new memory optimization algorithms. The first simulation results for two major 5G applications are validated with measurement data and show the efficiency of iGeoStat to simulate multiple diffusion in realistic environments, within a reasonable amount of time and memory resources. Generated output maps confirm that diffusion has a critical impact on indoor mmWave propagation and that proper physical modeling is of the utmost importance to generate relevant propagation models.
Computing Shapley Values for Mean Width in 3-D
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2020
Year: 2020

The Shapley value is a common tool in game theory to evaluate the importance of a player in a cooperative setting. In a geometric context, it provides a way to measure the contribution of a geometric object in a set towards some function on the set. Recently, Cabello and Chan (SoCG 2019) presented algorithms for computing Shapley values for a number of functions for point sets in the plane. More formally, a coalition game consists of a set of players $N$ and a characteristic function $v: 2^N \to \mathbb{R}$ with $v(\emptyset) = 0$. Let $π$ be a uniformly random permutation of $N$, and $P_N(π, i)$ be the set of players in $N$ that appear before player $i$ in the permutation $π$. The Shapley value of the game is defined to be $ϕ(i) = \mathbb{E}_π[v(P_N(π, i) \cup \{i\}) - v(P_N(π, i))]$. More intuitively, the Shapley value represents the impact of player $i$'s appearance over all insertion orders. We present an algorithm to compute Shapley values in 3-D, where we treat points as players and use the mean width of the convex hull as the characteristic function. Our algorithm runs in $O(n^3\log^2{n})$ time and $O(n)$ space. Our approach is based on a new data structure for a variant of the dynamic convolution problem $(u, v, p)$, where we want to answer $u\cdot v$ dynamically. Our data structure supports updating $u$ at position $p$, incrementing and decrementing $p$ and rotating $v$ by $1$. We present a data structure that supports $n$ operations in $O(n\log^2{n})$ time and $O(n)$ space. Moreover, the same approach can be used to compute the Shapley values for the mean volume of the convex hull projection onto a uniformly random $(d - 2)$-subspace in $O(n^d\log^2{n})$ time and $O(n)$ space for a point set in $d$-dimensional space ($d \geq 3$).
Shortest path distance approximation using deep learning techniques
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Computing shortest path distances between nodes lies at the heart of many graph algorithms and applications. Traditional exact methods such as breadth-first-search (BFS) do not scale up to contemporary, rapidly evolving today's massive networks. Therefore, it is required to find approximation methods to enable scalable graph processing with a significant speedup. In this paper, we utilize vector embeddings learnt by deep learning techniques to approximate the shortest paths distances in large graphs. We show that a feedforward neural network fed with embeddings can approximate distances with relatively low distortion error. The suggested method is evaluated on the Facebook, BlogCatalog, Youtube and Flickr social networks.
CSM-NN: Current Source Model Based Logic Circuit Simulation -- A Neural Network Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

The miniaturization of transistors down to 5nm and beyond, plus the increasing complexity of integrated circuits, significantly aggravate short channel effects, and demand analysis and optimization of more design corners and modes. Simulators need to model output variables related to circuit timing, power, noise, etc., which exhibit nonlinear behavior. The existing simulation and sign-off tools, based on a combination of closed-form expressions and lookup tables are either inaccurate or slow, when dealing with circuits with more than billions of transistors. In this work, we present CSM-NN, a scalable simulation framework with optimized neural network structures and processing algorithms. CSM-NN is aimed at optimizing the simulation time by accounting for the latency of the required memory query and computation, given the underlying CPU and GPU parallel processing capabilities. Experimental results show that CSM-NN reduces the simulation time by up to $6\times$ compared to a state-of-the-art current source model based simulator running on a CPU. This speedup improves by up to $15\times$ when running on a GPU. CSM-NN also provides high accuracy levels, with less than $2\%$ error, compared to HSPICE.
Improving Efficiency in Neural Network Accelerator Using Operands Hamming Distance optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Neural network accelerator is a key enabler for the on-device AI inference, for which energy efficiency is an important metric. The data-path energy, including the computation energy and the data movement energy among the arithmetic units, claims a significant part of the total accelerator energy. By revisiting the basic physics of the arithmetic logic circuits, we show that the data-path energy is highly correlated with the bit flips when streaming the input operands into the arithmetic units, defined as the hamming distance of the input operand matrices. Based on the insight, we propose a post-training optimization algorithm and a hamming-distance-aware training algorithm to co-design and co-optimize the accelerator and the network synergistically. The experimental results based on post-layout simulation with MobileNetV2 demonstrate on average 2.85X data-path energy reduction and up to 8.51X data-path energy reduction for certain layers.